NASA's Insight Lander Records The Martian Wind
       

One must blip a mind of silicate, chassis of graphite,
to regard the dunes, scab-brown basalt rocks,
storms churning the pale horizon russet;

and have nested long in gelid interplanetary
flight to record the heat from a sun no
larger to the eye than a ferry token;

to gauge the chill in a season that is not winter,
not a season at all, merely frozen carbon-dioxide;
wind on solar panels, senseless

as if deep in the sea a gong were struck; one must
listen as one would drink water lacking oxygen,
watch fire without motion, sniff color from no pigment,

and, bereft of ossicles, hear weather from that desert,
merely the non-ear perceiving there is an is,
and which is there except for the ears that are not.

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Copyright © 2019 Anthony Seidman All rights reserved
from The Bitter Oleander
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission